1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to an image forming apparatus including an interface of a portable recording medium being detachable, and more particularly to the image forming apparatus in which setting information can be backed up to the portable recording medium and/or restored from the portable recording medium, so as to easily manage a plurality of image forming apparatuses.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, an image forming apparatus accommodating various functions acting as a printer, a copier, a facsimile, a scanner, and a like within a single chassis has been widely used. In the image forming apparatus being a compound type, a display part, a print part, and imaging part are mounted within the single chassis, and three applications respectively corresponding to the printer, the copier, and the facsimile are implemented. By switching among three applications, the image forming apparatus functions as the printer, the copier, the scanner, or the facsimile.
Since more functions are implemented into the image forming apparatus, the number of items for setting to the image forming apparatus has been increased. In general, various items are manually set by an administrator at an operation panel of the image forming apparatus or through a Web screen displayed at a PC (Personal Computer) or a like connected to the image forming apparatus via a network.
Accompanying to the increase of the items to set, item values being set are stored in a case of recovering the image forming apparatus when a malfunction occurs. For example, in an information processing system described in Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 2003-316526, when configuration information of the information processing system is changed, the configuration information being changed is stored to a plurality of different portable recording medium. Thus, it becomes easily to recover the information processing system.
Moreover, in a print condition setting method for a printer described in Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 2003-175657, it becomes possible to select a desired print condition file from a memory card recording a plurality of print condition files.
However, in the information processing system described in the Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 2003-316526, only a single information processing system can be handled. Also, in a case of simultaneously managing a plurality of the information processing systems, there is a problem in that the configuration information cannot be shared among the plurality of the information processing systems.
In addition, in the print condition setting method for the printer described in the Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 2003-175657, is the setting information to use can be selected from a plurality of sets of setting information. However, the Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 2003-175657 simply discloses to read the setting information from a memory card but does not disclose a means for re-using the setting information of a device which is stored in the memory card. Thus, there is no means to safely conduct a backup and a restore of the setting information.